Mother’s So my wonderful midwife, wonderful midwife, was able to be with me in her time off, she came in an extra shift to spend time with me, and she desperately, desperately wanted to be there when the baby was born, to support me. And so she, she cleared her diary to get to stay with me.

And she was there when [the baby] was born. And the, the biggest worry at the time was whether or not there would be, you know, this kind of disfigurement really, because we were still left with this feeling that there might be this, we, they call it ‘cyclops syndrome where theres just one eye in the middle. And although we hadn’t really seen any proper evidence of that personally, we were still left with this doubt in our mind that this might be the case.

And so I was saying to the midwife, you know, when she was born, ‘What’s she.. because I said, ‘If shes really, if it’s really bad I’m going to need some time to adjust before I can look at her,’ and you know, ‘How is she?’ And she just said, ‘Shes just perfect,’ you know. And so shed died during labour.

They’d been, they hadn’t monitored but they’d used a doppler just to find her heartbeat, and so they, they discovered that about 1 in the morning, she was born at 8, just after 8, and, that she, they couldn’t find a heartbeat any more and so shed died. Which made life, in a sense, it made it easier to take because we weren’t going to have to, weren’t going to have, well, I hope it makes it easier I don’t know’but it felt like it was easier to deal with because we knew that she wouldn’t be alive. And she, you know, she was, she was, just a perfect baby really at 31 weeks.

What did she weigh?

Mother’s She weighed, can you remember? It was 3 lbs.

Father’s Yes, 3 lbs.

Mother’s 3′ lbs I think it was.

Father’s Is that 1 ‘ kilos or something?

Mother’s Yes. And I mean she looked perfect, but I think in a sense for us it was obvious she wasn’t perfect, because when we felt her head you could tell that it felt squidgier than a normal baby at that age. And I don’t whether that, that’s how we felt. It may be that that has absolutely no bearing at all medically on, but it, we felt okay with that, you know. That was, you know, we were comfortable with that.

I re-, my initial reaction was absolutely no way. Then, I think because the professionals advised it – they perhaps know best – and I do see the point of view and I think, I don’t think I could have won on that one to be honest. If I hadn’t have done it, I maybe would have always regretted it.

But she actually had her, all her facial features were dismorphic. She had no ears and an enlarged head. So in the two days I decided, ‘Yes, I would quite like to hold my baby’ I had a little picture in my mind of a tiny little baby, perfect little baby, which she didn’t look like.

And although I’ve read lots of letters since that people look through the deformities and see a pretty baby, I didn’t. So that was quite shocking. So although I did hold her and see her, it was probably something I would have had to do, I’d have had to do, that I couldn’t have not done it, but I’m not saying it actually did a lot for me. I can’t, I’m not sure, I can’t decide.

It didn’t at first but then I’ve since had the ARC (Antenatal Results and Choices) newsletter and I read all the stories, and everybody else was opposite to me but one [laughs]. Eventually one letter came through from a woman who said, ‘I’ve read all these letters and I didn’t feel like that. So, no it doesn’t worry me now. But, and it didn’t worry me a great deal at the time, just a little nagging doubt maybe that, ‘Am I different to everyone else, you know, were my feelings wrong?’ But no, I generally feel that I did the right thing.

So I’ve talked about deciding the approach that we wanted to take with the birth, and we both felt quite strongly about that… I was, wanted to deliver in a way that I was least likely to see the baby, that was my other anxiety. It was not seeing the baby and I talked to midwife quite a bit about how, what was the best way of doing it so that I didn’t end up inadvertently seeing the baby, I was quite sure that I didn’t want to do that.

I think, having gone through it again since and seeing and held the baby and all the rest of it, I think what I was trying to avoid was fronting up to what was happening. I think I just wanted this to be minimal impact, and I thought if I didn’t know the sex of the baby, I didn’t see it, that it would be less of a baby somehow and it would be more of a miscarriage. And I can remember that was very much the language that I used at the time – ‘miscarriage – and that’s all I talked about to people, that I was had a miscarriage.

And I think, technically, it is a miscarriage pre-24 weeks and so we were technically just, just under 24 weeks so that suited me as well. And I, and that’s what I was running with, was the idea that the less we made of it, the less of a thing it would be in our lives for the long term.

In fact that completely was the opposite way, as it’s transpired. But that’s what I was thinking at the time. And I had been counselled that that wasn’t, wasn’t the norm, and that wasn’t their experience but I felt I knew best so I went on with that track.

But interestingly, when the baby was born, just for the instant when, when she was born, I wanted to see her. Really, and I wasn’t afraid at all. I think I’d thought I would be afraid of seeing this tiny, tiny thing and but the minute she was born my instant reaction was that I wanted to see her. But I let my rational thinking come to the fore and, and my husband, I said to my husband that I’d like to see her, and he said, ‘No, you don’t, we don’t, remember we don’t. And I thought, ‘No we don’t, you’re right, we don’t.

And the midwife said, ‘Well you don’t need to decide now, I’ll take her away,’ – well ‘it’ away, as it was then, ‘And you can, you know, decide. You’ve got, you know, hours, you’ve got days if you want. You don’t need to decide that right now.

And the baby was, and it was, again, a fairly simple birth and the baby was born but she was delivered in the sac, in the amniotic sac, was all complete, so it wasn’t the midwife said, ‘It’s probably best not to see her this way, let me take her away and burst the sac and I’ll bring her back.

And they brought her back and I was more excited that I was anything else, excited. I would parallel it with seeing my live children when they were born, I was just excited to see her. I didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl so I was excited to know what sex the baby was and to see it, I wasn’t really afraid, but when she came into the room carrying a Moses basket which was like tiny, this tiny thing and, I was a bit taken aback by the tinyness of the basket which then made me think, God, you know. Then I got a bit, a bit scared of seeing the baby, and then went under the duvet, and said to the midwife, ‘Describe what you see.

So she described what she was seeing and likened it’s size to, it’s not Tiny Tears, it’s more sort of Cindy doll size and then [husband] said, ‘I’ll see it first,’ so he saw it and then I said to [husband], ‘What do you think, can I cope with seeing it?’ He said, ‘I think you’re going to be a bit shocked, actually, I’m not sure you can see it. And I was like, no way, you’ve seen it, I’m seeing it and I was really sure about that.

But he said, ‘Well, I think you’re going to be a bit shocked, it doesn’t look as baby-like as I thought,’ and he said, ‘It looks all purple and brown, sort of very dark and sort of very perfect but not very fleshy and just looked a bit skeletony,’ and all this.

So I think it helped to hear that. So that when I did look I was a bit shocked myself that it didn’t look at baby-like as I thought, and it didn’t look pink and fleshy and sort of fluffy, it looked pretty horrible really I thought, I don’t think it looked nice even, because their eyes are fused and just tiny, tiny skinny limbs and things, and all a bit out of proportion, the head sort of big. So it wasn’t like holding a stillborn baby, you know, I’ve seen, through my nursing I’ve seen stillborn babies, they just look like tiny, asleep babies, so it didn’t look like that. It didn’t look very, very nice, if I’m honest. But I’ve never regretted doing that, it was definitely the right thing to do.

I think in fairness to the, to the agency midwives there who are only, who, sort of, they’re only there 9 to 7 so when they go off duty you then get a night nurse, or whomever, and in fairness to them, they did say that I could see the baby when I wanted to. But I forgot about that. I was, I completely forgot about it – didn’t even think about it at all afterwards – and it was only a day after being at home when it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Oh, my God I could have seen [the baby]- for most of the night I could have, you know, I should have done. My God, you know, wheres my maternal instinct? Why didn’t I have, why didn’t it occur? Why didn’t it occur to me to want to see and hold my baby again?. You know, and I felt racked with guilt about that.

But I contacted the bereavement midwife at the hospital and was, and she said, Well, that’s not a problem [name]. You come in and you, you can see him now hes still here. I was told where he would go. We were asked whether wed like photographs of him, and we said yes we did, which they took. They had to actually re-do them, unfortunately because the ones that the agency nurse took were just, [sighs] just… I mean, I didn’t, we didn’t get to see them because they had to re-take them, they were just very… you know there were no clothes on the baby, there was nothing. We didn’t get to see those but if, you know, again that was quite distressing.

But we were told that we could see him whenever we wanted to. And he was taken down to the mortuary and we were shown where the mortuary was. And we were told the names of the people that would be looking after him and… because it was quite, very important to me that, to know exactly what was going to be happening with him. I guess that’s the maternal instinct. And they were, they were very good at that.

So we did go back and see him again which gave me a chance to say goodbye properly, because I hadn’t felt that I’d had the chance at the birth to really say goodbye properly, so I wanted to do that.

And did you feel better, once you’d seen him? Do you feel a bit better, was it any solace?

Yes it was, absolutely definitely. I don’t, I think it would have been much harder for me to come to terms with the loss of [baby] had I not had a chance to say goodbye to him properly, and see him again, so that I can picture his face. And he was less bruised when I saw him 3 days after the birth – he was less bruised – he looked much more peaceful. Whereas immediately after the birth he was very… he was quite dark, which again they didn’t inform you of. They don’t tell you that at all and it’s huge, huge shock, huge shock that you’re expecting a little sort of pink baby to come out, and that doesn’t always happen when they’re so little. Their bodies aren’t prepared to go down the birth canal, and they get terribly, terribly bruised, bruised to the extent that they look sort of… terribly, almost black in parts.

And you’re not, and I mean you’re not informed that that’s what to expect. It’s quite a shock. And again, as a mother you live with the guilt that, oh, you know the first sight of your baby was a shock, and you think, ‘Well, that shouldn’t be like that. You shouldn’t feel like that, and that’s wrong to feel like that… and I felt, again quite guilty that that was how I felt.

So I do wish that they had emphasised the-, you know told us more about what to expect. So when we went back to see him 3 days afterwards he was pink and his nose was pink and he was more, he was how I’d imagined he would be born.

Yes, he was perfect, but I wanted to check him. I had to take his clothes off – there are special gowns made for little babies which were donated to the ward on the mainland, and theres someone knits shawls for them. The midwives have little teddy bears that they put into the Moses crib – they have a proper crib – proper bedding, and he was even wearing a nappy, but I had to check everything, I did poke around.

My husband got to hold him and I was even saying to my husband, ‘Hold him properly, don’t let his head drop,’ which is totally irrational because theres nothing going to damage him now, but I think that’s just again Mother Nature taking over, you still have a baby, you’re still allowed to hold your baby and you must look after him.

So we were actually allowed to have him overnight and through to lunchtime the next day, which was very good of them to let us have him that length of time.

We had a chaplain come to visit, we had a blessing. The midwives popping in every hour or so, and make sure I’m okay, how am I doing, see if my husband’s okay. And we just, we held him, we just spent the whole time holding him and looking after him, and they took photographs – they took his foot prints, hand prints, measured him.

We have a little booklet with all his details, and that’s something that I think I needed. Some mothers don’t, they just prefer the baby to be taken away and they don’t name their baby, but I had a name. I wanted to know who he was, because he was. As soon as you’re pregnant you have a baby, it’s not a fetus, you’re actually carrying a child. So regardless of the fact that he wasn’t going to be alive, hes still my son.

So I kept her with me the night and that, and as I say, [husband] by this time was fast asleep because he was absolutely exhausted. But I don’t know what I was, what was keeping me going. I think what it was is that I knew that I’d only got that night with her, I wouldn’t have any more time, and then in the morning she was going down to the morgue. So that was, to me I needed to spend that time. And I wasn’t tired at all, it was really strange, and I hadn’t slept the night before that either because I was obviously anxious about what was going to happen.

And I just wasn’t tired. So, like I say, I just kept her with me, kept looking at her and talking to her, and sort of explained to her why I’d done what I’d done and hoping that shed forgive me one day and blah, blah, blah.

And I think in the end I probably fell to sleep – it must have been about 6 oclock in the morning – and I remember the midwife who actually delivered [the baby], she was really really nice, she even extended her shift so she could actually be there when she was born, because they would have had to change halfway through my labour, and she stayed, and she was there in the morning when I woke up. And it was very strange, and as soon as I saw her I just burst out crying.

I mean it’s a very, it’s a very, I feel slightly, not embarrassed, but slightly sort of, it seems a bit of a silly thing to, maybe it just, maybe it was just a way that helped me deal with the grief because I suddenly thought, ‘Well, no, this isn’t a dead child. This is actually a child that’s waiting to be born’ and therefore it helped me with the grief. And so maybe it was something I invented to help me move through it.

However, I do believe our daughter, you know, you hear, you hear the, the expression, ‘A very old soul’ and I mean she seems to be a very grown-up little baby. So maybe there is something there, it certainly helped me.

The second time it happened, again my wife gave the little girl a name, and I just don’t subscribe to that, it doesn’t, doesn’t work for me. But we, we live very happily with that. And she refers to them on their birthdays by their names, and it’s – sound cold about it – but it just doesn’t mean anything to me. It doesn’t, the birthdays don’t mean anything to me, the, they don’t, don’t not mean anything to me but they don’t, they don’t have a huge significance. I really believe that, that person got born.